A Swede Makes K-Pop Waves

Psy’s “Gangnam Style” may be the biggest hit ever to come out of South Korea—410 million YouTube views and counting—but the country’s pop-music scene has long been one of the hottest in Asia. Thanks to telegenic stars with great dance moves and over-the-top videos, K-pop for the past decade been a major exporter of hits and heartthrobs around the region.

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But pop is about more than just glitz. It actually requires great music. Which has many people asking: What is it about K-pop that so many find so appealing?

Cato Lein

Pelle Lidell, who has sold hit songs to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, is now selling them to K-pop acts such as Girls’ Generation.

“The key to K-pop’s world-wide success is not its Koreanness, but the lack of it,” said Lee Keewoong, a sociologist at Yonsei University in Seoul.

For Koh Younghwan, a former music executive and Berklee College of Music graduate in engineering, the sound of Korea’s formulaic electro pop, while over-compressed and over-produced, has some loose connections to its traditional music forms. “Only Korean traditional music had a sense of swing,” Mr. Koh said. “It wasn’t New Orleans jazz, but it was pretty darn close.”

One person uniquely positioned to know is Pelle Lidell, European executive of A&R at Universal Music Publishing, who says his roster of European songwriters have sold more than 10 million K-pop records since he began writing for them in 2008. “I’ve lost track,” he says, “it might be 20 million now.”